Thankfully the days are now largely gone when partners were elected to leadership positions solely because of their effectiveness as lawyers, with management and leadership often regarded as ‘admin’ and done in the margins of the working day.
However, the transition from being a working partner to a leader is still a huge step. Leadership of a professional partnership requires the very highest order of influencing skills to persuade fellow partners, who act largely as sole practitioners sharing a brand franchise, to collaborate, to cross-sell, to follow processes, to let others in to client relationships and to adopt the behaviours that will make a difference to the bottom line. Partners are clearly highly intelligent, but they have had almost zero opportunity to develop management and leadership skills in their career progression. Moreover, because these skills are largely behavioural and interpersonal, a theoretical understanding of how to use them will only go so far: they have to be tried out and practised in real life for valuable learning to take place.
